Virus: The Day of Resurrection (32 page)

In like manner, the television and radio stations continued working as though possessed to maintain their programming schedules. Despite the fact that thirty percent of local stations had already gone silent—and despite the fact that almost all of the flagship stations had cut their broadcasts to a combined total of four hours a day for morning, noon, and night—still, they kept on broadcasting. Aside from international and domestic news, broadcasting stations put a great effort into producing entertainment programming. They were like parents on the verge of freezing to death, trying desperately trying to coax smiles from their freezing children. One radio station—transistor radios had spread far and wide—continued playing popular songs both old and new, as well as pop tunes and jazz twenty-four hours a day.

Day by day, the desolation spread throughout society, and all manner of local religions, both old and new, began to run riot with ferocious energy. Some people danced wildly, others packed into small houses, jostling against one another as they chanted sutras.

“The end has come for this world because human beings have never done anything but evil. Everyone will fall into
Jigoku
now.”

“Brothers! Surrender and you can all be saved!”

Yes, what else could they do except pray? People who prayed were people who were still fighting. The career intelligentsia and the leaders were completely ineffectual, but some of the priests, preachers, and thinkers were still crying out. But were their cries of any help? Even people who knew perfectly well that their prayers would not be rewarded were praying now as well. If there had ever been a time to pray, this was it. The trains were stopped, and now the electricity was starting to disappear. When fires broke out, they weren’t extinguished; the flames just spread wider and wider. At the roadsides, in the houses, in the entrances of the stations and office buildings, countless corpses lay, swelling up and rotting. The humid climate gave vigor to maggots and bacteria, and some bodies had already skeletonized. The stench of death that hung over the world was horrible, and the wings of desolation sounded a great wind as they spread out over the land. Bodies were everywhere: in cars that had been torn apart in collisions with telephone poles, in the muddy water of half-planted rice paddies, on the lawns of parks and in shrubbery, in trains that had stopped in transit between stations, at roadsides, at the doorways of houses, and even in the water of stagnated canals. Even in high-end residences and hotels, there were often a number of bodies lying around, barely covered by the white cloths laid over them. The public housing projects were already huge graveyards. Beside a sandbox lay the putrefying corpse of a small child, left uncollected because his parents were already dead.

The city of Tokyo, which had once overflowed with twelve million people, was now turning into a vacant necropolis. The cars that had once crowded its streets were gone now. The windows of empty buildings, the grid of highways now desolate and without motion, the subways that no longer ran—impossible to enter now because of the hydrogen sulfide released by an abundance of rotting corpses.

Blue methane flames rose up from vents here and there along Ginza Avenue, and the entire city was suffused with a stomach-churning miasma.

The sight of things that moved was becoming rarer and rarer in the city, and whenever a human form did occasionally appear during this time, it was a silent member of the Self-Defense Forces, executing his futile mission to dispose of the bodies. They wore gas masks whenever working in the city, and the strange rubber masks made them look like carrion-eating ghouls. At first, they handled the bodies with great care, as though dealing with casualties of war. But by the end of the first week following the commencement of operations, the soldiers were no longer capable of worrying so much about public opinion. They dug holes and pushed the bodies into them with bulldozers. At last, the disgusting work that had picked up nicknames such as “Auschwitz ops” and “Banana ops” began. Bodies were collected matter-of-factly, stacked up in large heaps, doused in gasoline, and burnt with flamethrowers, recalling the time when a large shipment of bananas that had arrived from cholera-stricken Taiwan had been burned upon arrival at Kobe Harbor.

Heavy columns of thick black smoke rose up from the pyramids of dead bodies, billowing up into the oppressive gray sky of the rainy season, and loud pops came from the bodies as they swelled up amid the heat of the flames. The voices of people reciting sutras came spilling out from nearby houses as though they were crawling along the ground. Then at last the rains of what might have been called a record-breaking rainy season arrived, falling long and heavy, like a curtain falling on the bodies and the desolated land.

By June 30, eighty million people had died throughout Japan. However, at that time, somewhere under twenty million were still living.

4. Antarctica

“It sounds like it’s getting really bad,” murmured Tatsuno. He was in his own room—that is to say, in the tiny room containing only his bed and his desk—facing the wireless.

“Did you get hold of any of your ham radio buddies this morning?” asked Yoshizumi from the doorway. Besides Yoshizumi, five other members of the wintering team were crowded into the tiny room, and all of them were leaning forward, eager for even the smallest tidbit of information about the horrible circumstances overtaking the northern hemisphere.

“Yesterday, I got a ham operator in the Fiji Islands. But the signal was bad between here and Japan …” Tatsuno bit his lower lip and, looking almost as though he were in prayer, began to slowly turn the dial while continually transmitting a CQ sign.

“JA7GK,” an accented, powerful voice suddenly answered. Everyone caught their breath for a moment, but then sighed in disappointment as they recognized the voice. It was the guy who went by the handle of “Ahab” over at Australia’s Mawson Station—right next door, as it were, to Showa Station. “Hello, JA7 George Kepler. Have you managed to get ahold of anyone?”

‘George Kepler’ was Tatsuno’s handle. “It’s no good,” he replied. “The signal’s bad, so there’s been nothing since yesterday. How about you?”

“There was a doctor in Uganda at five-thirty this morning, but we could only talk for two minutes.” Ahab’s voice usually sounded as cheerful as a trumpet, but today it was mournful. “Things sound really bad out there. The doctor was wondering out loud if Central Africa might be completely wiped out by now. Not just the people either; the lions and the elephants too.”

“So elephants can die of flu too, can they?”

“Apparently, it’s not flu. Haven’t you heard, George Kepler? The flu’s going around, yes, but there’s another, unknown disease that’s going around with it. That’s what the doctor was saying, anyway.”

“What else did the doctor say? How many have died?”

“He said he didn’t know for sure. There hasn’t been any signal from Cairo Broadcasting in over ten days. Zanzibar’s gone silent too. This is just that doctor’s best guess, but he said that about half the population of the entire world may have already been laid out by this thing.”

“
Half?
” Tatsuno said in a voice that was suddenly much higher pitched. “One and a half billion? What do you mean, ‘laid out’? Do you mean that they’ve caught it? Or that they’re—”

“He told me that ‘half are probably dead.’ ” Ahab’s voice was cracking up and he sounded near to despair. “And he said that more than eighty percent of the people on this planet probably have it. Can you believe such a thing?”

The people standing behind Tatsuno had gone pale. Not one of them uttered a word. Already, they had heard similar things again and again, but hearing it now, the shock was being rubbed all the more deeply into their bodies.

“That doctor said he wasn’t long for this world either. And then finally his signal dropped off. He never said ‘over.’ He just said ‘adieu.’ Hey, listen …”

Ahab hesitated for a moment, and suddenly a ham operator called Frankonei from France’s Dumont d’Urville Base broke in speaking his obnoxiously masterful English. “JA7GK, I’ve managed to listen in on a couple of amateur hams in Reims and Rio de Janeiro. Shall I read what they said to you?”

“What did they say?”

“The ham in Rio says, ‘It’s a mountain of corpses here, the power’s out, there are fires, crazed gangs are rampaging out of control, and the death toll keeps climbing. I estimate eight thousand survivors still in Rio. The residents of Brasilia have been wiped out, and the stink is so horrible I can hardly stand it. The sea is covered in bodies. The end of the world has come. Amen.’ Then the ham in Reims said, ‘Reims is burning, and the batteries will give out soon. I don’t see how I’ll be able to get any more. My wife committed suicide ten minutes ago. God has sent this disease to wipe out a sinful world. I can’t hear a thing here except the sound of the fires. Clear weather. Eloi, Eloi, lead us into your presence … Ah, confound it all! Wiped out by influenza! What a scornful way to destroy us! Amen.’ ”

“Amen …” said Ahab. “George Kepler—did Japan’s public broadcasting ever come back on? At 1300 and 1500 hours, there was a little noise out of Sydney, but nothing since. “

“We can raise Chōshi by way of their international telephone, but the signal fades in and out,” Tatsuno said. “Yesterday at 1400 hours, they spoke with our station’s radio station. They’re having trouble supplementing their power source, apparently. There are only eight people running things over there at present, and three of them just recently came down with fevers. There’s been nothing from them since then.”

Neither Ahab nor Frankonei said anything for a moment. Beyond the crackle of white noise, they could hear the mad roar of a blizzard outside. But even the blizzard seemed about to die down.

“Starting at 1710, Telstar 25 should enter an orbital position where we can communicate with her,” Ahab said simply. “All we can do is just pray that there’s a satellite broadcaster in some country somewhere that’s transmitting television signals. Over and out.”

Ahab cut off his signal. Frankonei also withdrew. The five men who had their heads stuck into Tatsuno’s room left in ones or twos, until only Yoshizumi was left. Tatsuno still sat in front of the wireless, continuing to transmit his call sign.

“Tatsuno,” Yoshizumi called. “You crying?”

“So what if I am?” Tatsuno didn’t turn around, but his voice was unexpectedly fierce. “If I’m crying, what’s it to you?”

With that, Tatsuno suddenly burst into tears in front of the wireless.

“How can something this
stupid
even happen!” he said with a sob. “This is
ridiculous
 … Japan destroyed in less than two months, and rest of the world is …”

“Tatsuno,” Yoshizumi said, gently putting a hand on Tatsuno’s shoulder from behind. “Somebody’s calling you.”

Tatsuno sat up straight with a gasp and looked at the speaker. Amid waves of hissing static, a voice that seemed to be calling out Tatsuno’s call sign could be faintly, oh-so-faintly discerned, though it was apt to be scrubbed out by the white noise and disappeared at times.

“JA7GK … Hello, JA … K …”

“Station QRZ?” Tatsuno queried, cranking up the transciever’s output all the way. “Hello, this is station JA7GK.”

“JA7GK …” The faint voice sounded as if it were floating on waves that flowed in and ebbed back out again, but even so, it could be heard more distinctly than before. “Hello, JA7GK. This is JA6YF—”

“That’s Kyushu,” Tatsuno shouted in a choked voice. “Hello, JA6YF, this is JA7GK. How’s your reception? Over.”

“JA7GK, this is JA6YF. We are DXFB over here. How’s your DX over there? Over.” “DXFB” meant that reception was good.

“This is JA7GK. We are DXFB as well,” Tatsuno said, suddenly choking up as big tears spilled down his face.

“Hello, JA6YF—where in Kyushu are you broadcasting from? Over.”

“This is JA6YF, we’re on Yakushima …” The voice vanished into a snowstorm of static, then returned moments later. “… Kyushu. The mainland … all regions silent. Hello, JA7GK, can you hear me? This is JA6YF … this is Japan’s last … JA7GK, where are you broadca … Over.”

“This is JA7GK, the ham radio at Showa Station, Antarctica,” Tatsumi went on, not even trying to wipe his tears. “How are things on Yakushima and the mainland? Over.”

“I don’t know about the mainland. There’s smoke on the horizon. It looks like Kyushu is burning. Hello, JA7GK, ninety percent of us on Yakushima Island are dead. Many via suicide. Most of the survivors are on the beach praying or something.” Suddenly, JA6YF coughed violently. It was pitiful how long the coughing spell went on.

“7GK, hello … can you hear? Is Antarctica safe? If so, please call … hello …”

“Who?” Tatsuno asked. “Who? Who do you want me to call?”

“Get a doctor … and tell the hams and at every station … call a doctor who speaks English … call for WA5PS … it just spoke … was requesting transmission. WA5PS is … scholar … Amer …”

“Hello, JA6YF!” Tatsuno practically screamed. “What’s happening? I couldn’t catch that! Hello, this is JA7GK—”

“Looks like this is it for me …” The voice of JA6YF—a man apparently well educated and young—had grown old and pained. “My heart is … WA5PS wants to tell you something. Well then, JA7GK, thanks for talking to me. This is JA6 …”

Emanating from a faraway geographical point on a tiny volcanic island covered in tropical Japanese cedars—more than ninety degrees of longitude removed from Showa Station—came the sound of JA6YF, the last ham radio operator in Japan, sliding from his chair and falling to the floor. It made an unexpectedly clear thump, which leapt across more than ten thousand kilometers of sky and sea, arriving in Antarctic skies to burst at last from the speaker before Tatsuno.